The point has often been made that people’s experiences in their daily lives inevitably influence their perceptions of wider issues. A thought that occurred to me is that how people see the British pub scene may well be affected by their use of the transport system.
According to the latest edition of the Department for Transport’s Transport Statistics Great Britain, 82% of all adults between the ages of 30 and 59 hold a driving licence, broken down between 86% of males and 77% of females. Although it isn’t analysed in the statistics, those who don’t are likely to be disproportionately drawn from the lower socio-economic categories, so amongst mature adults in the ABC1 groups, not having a licence is a distinct rarity.
Yet I would say those who don’t are considerably over-represented amongst those who pursue pubs and beer as a leisure interest. Before anyone jumps down my throat, this is purely an observation, not any kind of criticism. For some, it may have been a deliberate decision, as being a non-driver makes life simple and avoids a whole load of sacrifices, compromises and balancing acts. But it’s probably more a case of seeing it as an easily accessible hobby, or because being a public transport enthusiast (where there is a strong overlap wth CAMRA activism) makes the idea of taking up driving less attractive in the first place.
As a non-driver, virtually all of your long-distance journeys will probably be by train between the centres of towns and cities, even travelling relatively short distances such as between Manchester and Rochdale. There’s a lot that you will see, but also, by not using the roads, a lot that you will miss. It’s really only through travelling by road that you will witness for yourself the scale of the devastation of the British pub trade in recent years.
Journey from the centre of Manchester to any of its major satellite towns and you’ll see a whole parade of closed and boarded pubs. Over time, some will be demolished or converted to alternative use, but plenty still remain. On some trips, such as that to Oldham, there may well be more closed pubs than open ones. Continue over the tops to Huddersfield, and you’ll see plenty more. And on any longer journey away from the motorway network, the evidence of pub closures in rural areas, villages and small towns is inescapable. Often, each trip made every year or so will reveal yet another one that has bitten the dust. If your experience was confined to your own local area, and the centres of towns and cities in other parts of the country, you could be forgiven for concluding that the trade continued to enjoy fairly rude health
On the other hand, you will also miss a major advance in the pub trade. On the outskirts of pretty much every town of any size, you will now find a modern retail park, and alongside this, more often than not, you will find a new-build family dining pub, often, although not always, owned by Greene King or Marston’s. They may not be your cup of tea, or mine, but they must represent about the biggest category of bricks-and-mortar investment in the sector in recent years.

I’m just looking at the departures screen. “Our flight leaves from pier D.”

“What’s so good about that?”

“It’s where the Irish pub is.”

We’ve already picked up sandwiches from La Place using a voucher Andrew got from his work. It took a while for them to accept it. First all the staff behind the counter, then off for a consultation with the manager, before we get the nod.

“How much did it cost, dad?” Alexei asks me.

“Seventeen euros fifty.”

“Is that with or without the fifteen euro voucher?”

“Without. With, just two fifty. It’s still blooming expensive.”

We’re already checked in and have to hold bags so we can waltz straight through to security. It’s always a worry, going up those stairs, wondering how far the queue will stretch back. Though if it’s really bad you can tell before, as it will come all the way down the stairs. Then you know you’re in for a fun two hours of shuffling slowly forward.

We’re in luck. There are only a dozen or so people in front of us. As soon as we get to the front, Andrew starts chatting with the staff. He’s recently started working at security here. It’s slightly strange, him chatting to his colleagues. Not used to the lazy git being gainfully employed rather than stuck behind his computer all day.

They pull my bag out for closer inspection. They always do. I factor that into my timings.

It’s a bit of a walk to pier D. Just as well we’ve left plenty of time. I don’t want to have to rush my pint.

The kids don’t remember the Irish pub.

“You must have been here before.”

“I can’t remember it, Dad.” Says Andrew.

“Strange. I’ve been here loads of times. I recognise all the bar staff.” Which is true. Tells you a lot about how often I’m in Schiphol.

This is going to be an interested trip. It’s the first time he’ll have been in Britain since turning 18. Which could make it an expensive trip for me.

“What do you want, boys?”

“Cider.”

“I’ll have a cider, too.”

“I won’t ask if you want a pint. No son of mine is going to drink a half.”

I go for a Murphy’s Stout. And a double Jamesons. It is 5 PM, after all.

Alexei is quickly through his cider. He’s knocked it back like apple juice, which is what he usually drinks.

“Another one, Lexie?”

“Yes, please.”

“I’ll have a Stout, dad” Andrew chips in.

We’re flying with Flybe to Doncaster Sheffield airport. Maybe a little further than East Midlands, but much easier to get to from Newark. Straight up the A1. And it’s nice and small, like East Midlands used to be until they changed it to a seatless shopping centre.

My brother David has arranged a taxi. He told the driver to look out for a fat old bloke and two giant lads. Cheeky git. The kids aren’t really that tall. For Dutch standards. He manages to find us easily enough. It’s a pretty small airport, after all.

Bizarrely, our driver is really into cycling. Despite, er, being built like a taxi driver. It’s hard to imagine him on a bike. He only just about fits in the car. And I say that as a fat old bloke.

We quite handily get to Dave’s just after the chippie next door opens. We get a pie and mushy peas each. And some chips. Unwisely, I order a large bag of chips. They keep shovelling more and more chips onto the pile until there’s a veritable chip mountain*. It must weigh a good two kilos. I’m not joking.

Luckily, there’s some beer to wash it down. A very special beer. My schoolfriend Henry has just opened a brewery in Collingham, a few miles outside Newark. And he’s brought over a firkin of a very special beer. A dead famous beer. Or should I say infamous? It’s 1963 Watney’s Red Barrel. Obviously, from a recipe of mine.

“You won’t be able to get a full pint,” David says, “It’s very heavily conditioned.”

He’s right. But I take his comment as a challenge. With a bit of patience I’m able to get a full glass with a lovely tight collar.

The beer itself is pretty nice. Obviously being cask rather than pasteurised to buggery, it’s not exactly a clone of the original. A good drinking beer. As the kids prove as they knock back pint after pint. No idea where they’ve got that from. Must be their Mum.

We need to get stuck into the firkin. 72 pints, four of us, three days. I make that six pints a day each. Another challenge.

Tomorrow there’s a special treat in store for Lexie: a trip to Wetherspoons. Where he’ll be able to enjoy a pint for the first time.

* The photo is actually of a small bag of chips. I forgot to snap the nountain. It was about three times the size of that.

The map referenced (irritatingly uncredited at first, though they’ve since apologised and given him a shout out) is from Ewan’s incredibly comprehensive London pub blog*Pubology.*Do go and explore it, and bookmark it, if you haven’t already. There are maps for many other postcodes (e.g.) many of which show a broadly similar picture — red and yellow dots in the backstreets, green on the arteries.
In the new book we give a bit of thought to how many pubs are closing, and which ones, concluding that it’s easy for middle class commentators to shrug closures off because it’s not*their pubs that are disappearing. This is another angle on the same issue.
We know @urbanpastoral is right from our own compulsive wandering: if you stick to main roads in London, or any other major city, there are plenty of pubs. But cut back a block and the story can be quite different. We’ve seen it with our own eyes — walked miles on the secondary route without seeing a single operating pub, even if the buildings remain, converted for residential, retail or some other use.
Coincidentally, on the same day, we came across a note of a parliamentary debate from 1961 in which one MP, William Rees-Davies, saw this coming:

I do not think that alcohol is evil in itself. I find that drinking with meals is more beneficial than drinking without a meal. I do not want ‘pub’ crawling to continue. That is why I coined the word—I thought it was quite attractive at the time—the ‘prub’. I believe that we shall see a social change in our time and the ‘pubs’ will become all-purpose restaurants. I believe that we shall see the larger ‘pubs’ taking over and the smaller ‘pubs’ gradually turning in their licences.

(He was MP for Thanet, by the way, which just happens to be micropub central.)
It all makes sense in commercial terms of course and big pubs on main roads have many advantages. Backstreet pubs don’t get as much passing trade, obviously. They can be a nuisance for those who live near them, and are harder to police. (More on this coming up.) And smaller pubs especially, without room for kitchens, waiters, gardens, pushchairs, and so on, are at a particular disadvantage in the 21st century.
Of course there are many, many exceptions — Bailey wrote about one earlier this week; and our old Walthamstow local The Nags Head is another. It’s funny, now we think of it, that those lingering backstreet pubs are often (to indulge in wishy-washy feelings for a moment) the nicest, being all the better for their seclusion and semi-secrecy.‘D
As it happens in our new neighbourhood, along with quite a few food-heavy ‘prubs’ on the A road, we’ve got a couple of surviving back street pubs. We’ll have to keep an eye on them. And, of course, drink in them as often as we can manage.‘Death of the Backstreet Boozer’ originally posted at Boak & Bailey&#039;s Beer Blog

The next big change in Barclay Perkins wartime Mild Ale was also provoked by a change in the rules.

Average gravity was cut again in early 1918:

April 1 1918: Conditions changed by provision that average gravity of all beer brewed shall not exceed 1030º for great Britain and 1045º for Ireland, and that no beer shall be brewed below 1010º: and prices fixed at 4d. per pint below 1030º, and 5d. per pint for 1030º to 1034º.Source: "The Brewers' Almanack 1928" pages 100 - 101.

The effect was immediate. X Ale (OG 1046º) and GA (OG 1038º) were both discontinued and replaced by a single new beer, Ale 4d. As the name implies, this fell into the sub 1030º bracket.

They may have dropped the gravity considerably, but the number of ingredients increased. There are now four types of malt: pale, brown amber and crystal. Plus two types of sugar. What I’ve represented as No. 4 invert was “Martineau’s BS” in the original. I assume it’s something similar.

With several dark malts, two types of dark sugar and caramel, unsurprisingly the colour has darkened. Quite possibly to make drinkers think it was stronger than it really was. Though you’d have noticed when, after five or six pints you weren’t getting intoxicated. It must have come as quite a shock to a generation used to Milds over 5% ABV.

Surprisingly, Ale 4d didn’t disappear with the restrictions on brewing. Even when X Ale returned in the summer of 1919, Barclay Perkins continued to brew it. Clearly there was a market for a watery Mild. It finally disappeared in 1943, when the gravity of X Ale had dropped to almost the same level.

With (give or take — counts vary) something like 1,600 breweries currently operating in the UK a common complaint is the difficulty for smaller operators of getting those beers to consumers.

Big pub companies, chains and supermarkets dominate the market, buying beer from a chosen few breweries willing to meet their demanding terms. In many regions one or two large players (e.g. St Austell) control many of the pubs leaving a fistful of freehouses to fight over. And, so we gather from interviews and off-the-record chat, new small breweries can sometimes find themselves muscled out by better-established players of more or less the same size.
Yesterday we got involved in some Twitter chat about beer from Devon (there’s a poll, actually, if you feel like voting) and a version of what seems to us to be a common conversation unfurled. To paraphrase:A: There’s no good beer in [PLACE]!B: Yes there is — breweries X, Y and Z are awesome!A: But I’ve never actually seen those beers for sale anywhere.B:*Ah.
In this context we’re beginning to think the single most important bit of information a small brewery can share is intelligence on where we can actually buy their beer, if it’s anything other than fairly ubiquitous.
It might be in the farmers’ market in Fulchester every third Sunday of the month; it might be in the delicatessen in Dufton; the bottle shop in Barchester; or the Coach & Horses in Casterbridge. We will go out of our way (a bit) to find a beer that sounds interesting, or to try something new on our beat, but we need a few hints, ideally without having to email or direct message the brewery. (And sometimes, even when we do that, we get*‘No idea, sorry’, or*‘It’s should be in a few pubs round Borsetshire this month’.)
A daily updated page on the brewery website, Facebook page or Twitter would probably work best.
We certainly appreciate that in the case of cask ale, even if a brewery knows a pub has taken delivery, it can be hard to say exactly when it’s going to go on or, equally, if it’s already sold out. Even so, wouldn’t a quick exchange of info between publican and brewer — a text message or social media nudge — be mutually beneficial here?
But perhaps there are good reasons why this doesn’t often seem to happen.
In the meantime, if you don’t know where your beer is on sale, and can’t tell people who want to buy it, then it almost might as well not exist.Where Can We Buy Your Beer? originally posted at Boak & Bailey&#039;s Beer Blog

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Fascinating for...Visit the Shut up about Barclay Perkins site

Fascinating for you all, I'm sure. But I'm just back from Newark, a bit knacked and feeling lazy.

As with my beer festival sups, Lager predominates. Now I've no time for Bavaria trips, I need to scratch my Lager itch somewhere.

Apologies for the IPA. It must have fallen into my basket accidentally.

I first visited the Ashburnham Arms in Greenwich’s Ashburnham triangle about 17 years ago, and it’s been lost to me ever since.

I was taken then by my flatmate, a Greenwich native, who had heard that the pub had won some award or other. I seem to recall it took us a while to find that time, too.
London streets rarely run in straight lines so two roads that seem to run at right angles can slowly curve to meet, while what feel like parallel lines can turn out to be subtly angled spokes off a hub. At the same time, the houses are made of the same London stock brick, to similar designs, denying the wanderer the necessary points of reference.
Even as you draw near, the Ashburnham can be hard to spot, its signage hidden behind shrubs, and its exterior otherwise resembling the grand 19th century houses that surround it.
Which, of course, makes it all the more charming — a kind of secret reserved for locals, not tourists.
So secret that when I’ve tried to return, I’ve failed, popping out in Greenwich Park, or on the high street, or in Deptford, thirsty and scratching my head.
Of course Google Maps spoils the fun. This time, I walked straight there with only a bare minimum of confusion and back-tracking.
It was much as I remembered it — multi-roomed, just; modernised, a bit; respectable, but not posh; friendly, without overdoing it.
It’s a Shepherd Neame pub and this time the only cask bitter on offer was Master Brew, their ‘ordinary’. It cost somewhere north of £4 a pint but tasted extraordinarily good — light, bright, and snapping with earthy, vivid, tea-like hop character.
I sat in a corner with my book and enjoyed the atmosphere. Outside, intense sunlight tempered by a breeze that carried the smell of the city and the jangle of ice cream vans through the open door; inside, the murmur of soft London accents, the sisterly chat of the bar staff, and the rustling of newspaper pages, all wrapped up in warm wood and scented with furniture polish.
As dinner service finished bowls of crisp, salty leftover roast potatoes were distributed around the pub — a physical manifestation of unpretentious hospitality.
I had to stop for a second pint, didn’t I? After all, I might never find the Ashburnham again.The Brigadoon Pub in Greenwich originally posted at Boak & Bailey&#039;s Beer Blog

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I awake feeling totally...Visit the Shut up about Barclay Perkins site

I awake feeling totally knacked. It takes two cups of tea to get me out of bed. Even after a shower I’m not that lively.

The selection of fried stuff is getting narrower every day. Yesterday there was no bacon. Today there are no meat balls, either. Still plenty of fruit.

As I get tucked into my fruit, I start to speak, but Dolores interrupts me.

“I know, the fruit means you can drink more beer. You say that every morning, Ronald.”

Sorry for being so predictable.

Dolores takes pity on me and lets me lie in bed while she goes off shopping. While she’s gone I get stuck into the remaining beers. Though, come to think of it, I took back quite a few beers. In fact, it’s only a few weeks ago I drank the last couple of bottles of Maisel & Friends.

She’s gone to the supermarket for some stuff to take home with us. And the second-hand clothes shop she looked around on Saturday. She’s been regretting not buying the dirt-cheap dirndl she spotted. Fingers crossed that it’s still there.

I’m three bottles into my stash when Dolores returns.

She immediately tries to switch channels.

“I was watching that.”

“But it’s rubbish.”

“I know. That’s why I was watching it.”

Die Trovatos, if you’re wondering. Quality stuff that you’ll only find on TV on a weekday morning.

We spend the next hour packing up all our shit, while do my best to reduce the weight of beer I’ll have to carry. Yet does Dolores thank me for my consideration?

Once we’ve checked out and dropped off our luggage, we head over to east of Warschauerstrasse again. It’s surprisingly busy for 12:15 on a Monday. There are quite a few people hanging around the bars and restaurants. Doesn’t anyone have to work around here? Though I wouldn’t personally be sat outside eating on the bits of the street with the bad drain smell. As some are.

Avoiding the stinky parts of the street, we have a quick pre-prandial beer. I’m trying to work out what the place is called. The sign is pretty cryptic:

Can you guess what it’s called? I couldn’t. It’s Plusminusnull. Not sure about that one. I am sure what I’m drinking: a half litre of Staropramen. Never my favourite. In fact the Czech beer I liked the least, back in the good old days.

We were thinking of dining in a Sudanese place. We spotted a couple yesterday. But the first one we come to is pretty small and cramped. So we troll a bit further down the street to a Vietnamese place, bizarrely called Soup & Rolls.

Unfortunately, they’re out of Hanoi beer. So I have to make do with a Saigon.

“Shouldn’t it really be a Ho Chi Minh City beer?”

“Very funny, Ronald.”

We kick off with a spring and a summer roll each. The spring rolls are dead good. The summer rolls not quite as good as on Saturday. My main course, crispy duck on fried noodles, is ace. Even though there’s quite a pile, I shovel it down. Dolores has a beef noodle salad that’s also pretty damn good.

Bags picked up, we face the long trek to Tegel. There are several possible routes, none perfect. The one with the fewest stairs isn’t practical. The M10 tram, as we discovered on Friday, doesn’t run all the way through due to works on the track. So we plump for the U-Bahn/S-Bahn route again. Despite all the stairs.

It’s all going well. Until there’s an announcement saying the train won’t go any further than Wedding, due to a Polizei Einsatz (police operation). Great. I quickly consult the network map. If we take the U6, we can connect with the 128 bus. More stairs. Just what we needed.

We squeeze onto the bus. And have to stand. There’s a bloke sitting nearby with a nose the size, shape and colour of a half-pound strawberry. It waves from side to side every time he moves his head.

We check in dead quickly. It helps that I can use the short queue because of my Sky Elite status.

We’ve still some time. The terminal we’re leaving from is a bit shit. An obviously temporary shed. So best be airside. Inside is pretty grim. Doesn’t look like they’ve changed anything since the 1970’s.

Luckily, there’s a little pub just outside our terminal. In an old S-Bahn carriage. I get myself a Kindl Jubiläums Pils. It isn’t great. But it is wet.

Our flight starts boarding early. And is ready to leave early. But we have to wait for 30 minutes for a air traffic control slot.

It is cheese in the sandwich on the way back. It looks just like the egg one. As is traditional, I wash it down with red wine.

The house is still in one piece. Unlike my Guinness. Alexei has drunk a couple of bottle. It could have been worse. He could have got stuck my Abt stash.

Cask beer is a natural, living, variable product and, as such, with the best will in the world, it’s inevitable that very occasionally you’ll be served with a sub-standard pint. What matters is not that it’s happened in the first place, but that the pub deals with the issue swiftly, politely and without quibble. Unfortunately, though, as Martin Taylor recently experienced, it doesn’t always work out that way, and an ill-mannered and unhelpful response can easily put a dampener on an enjoyable evening. Indeed, the whole business of returning beer to the bar can be something of a minefield.
The first thing is to be specific as to exactly what it is you’re complaining about. If the beer is obviously cloudy or vinegary, then you should have a cast-iron case, although opinions will vary on what degree of haziness is acceptable. Personally, unless it’s declared as a beer that is intentionally hazy, I’m pretty dogmatic on the issue, and will reject anything with more than a slight cast. But, of course, if it is a deliberately hazy beer, how do you or the bar staff know how much haze is too much?
However, there are other faults that are not so clear-cut, for example being served far too warm, lacking in condition, having a noticeable off-flavour such as diacetyl, or simply being generally tired and end-of-barrel-ish. If you’re in a pub where you’re a regular and are known to the licensee and bar staff, such a complaint might be taken seriously, but in a strange pub you could well feel that you are chancing your arm.
It’s also important to clear about your objective when making a complaint. Obviously the best solution is to be given an acceptable replacement, either the same beer which has been pulled through, or a new cask tapped, or a suitable alternative. Failing that, the aim should be to be given a refund, which you may well prefer if it’s the only cask beer on sale and you don’t fancy a Carling as a replacement. Or, in some cases, just venting your spleen will leave you with a sense of moral satisfaction.
The last two outcomes, though, imply that you’ll be bringing your visit to an end. If you’re in the middle of a pub crawl, or there’s an alternative pub nearby, or you’ve just popped in for a swift pint, that might be entirely acceptable. But in other situations, for example having a meal or social evening with a group, or watching a football match or live music performance, you might not want to do that, and thus be reluctant to create a fuss. You’ll just quietly leave the sub-standard pint, and put up with Guinness or Diet Coke for the rest of the proceedings. The point has also been made in the past by Tandleman that you’re going out for a pleasant social evening, and creating a confrontational situation may end up leaving a sour taste in the mouth even if you gain a moral victory.
I’d say in general that attitudes to changing sub-standard beer have improved over the years, although it may simply be that as a more mature chap I command more respect than a pimply youth. The days of “everyone else is drinking it” or “real ale’s meant to look like soup/taste like vinegar” are largely a thing of the past. One of the worst responses I recall was “but you’ve drunk some of it!” Well, if I hadn’t drunk any, how would I know it was foul?
However, as Martin and his friends found out, that kind of quibbling hasn’t entirely disappeared. In that case, although they had spent £60 in the pub, they would now think twice about going back and he has disseminated his experience over the Internet. Given the amount of goodwill at risk, compared with the gross profit on a pint, it’s hard to see why pubs continue to argue the toss about changing beer if customers present a reasonable case. After all, I don’t think anyone beyond a handful of troublemakers deliberately sets out to wind pubs up by returning perfectly good pints.
To their credit, Wetherspoon’s seem to have adopted a no-quibble policy when it comes to exchanging cask beer. Bar staff who are not beer experts will be in no position to decide whether or not a complaint is valid, and they must recognise how much goodwill they stand to lose. If any customer established a reputation as a “vexatious complainant”, I’m sure it would be brought to management’s attention.
No doubt someone will point out that that, if you stick to mass-market lagers and smooth beers, you won’t have any of this problem with variability. However, the point about cask beer is that, when it’s good, it’s much superior to kegs and lagers, and the occasional duff pint is a price worth paying for that. If you stick to pubs in the Good Beer Guide, or ones with a decent reputation locally, you’re unlikely to have much problem. The only returnable pints I’ve had in recent months have been when drinking off-grid in pubs that I happened to like the look of, but came with no recommendation. And keg beers, especially small-batch “craft” ones, are by no means immune from faults either.
But, if you go into a food- or sports-oriented pub with a solitary Doom Bar handpump at the end of a long line of kegs, it’s entirely understandable if you decide to give it a swerve. And, at least once, we’ve all been there with that pint of slightly warm, slightly flat, slightly stale, slightly hazy beer, where no one fault really makes a convincing case for taking it back, but we conclude the best solution is just to leave it unfinished on the table...